Harmony and History

Updated Dec. 28, 1999 12:01 a.m. ET

By Roger Scruton, a philosopher and novelist living in England.

T he millennium interests us because it reminds us of what is distinctive about Western civilization: its restless urge to build on the past, to appropriate the future, and to aspire to what is new. This urge is nowhere more finely exemplified than by our music. Western music has been a voyage of discovery, which also provides a matchless record of what we were and...